Sunday, 31 January 2010

I brought back a giant cupcake silicon mould from my trip to the USA recently. I'm having a party in March for my 40th birthday and thought it would be great to serve a couple of these up as dessert. The recipes that came with it talked about american boxes of cake mix, not available here and certainly not available gluten free so it was time to experiment.

Using a recipe given to me by the lovely Debs at Homerton Hospital, I tried a four egg sponge with the addition of a little coconut. I've made this before with a straight swap of Doves Farm GF plain for the wheat flour, adding in baking powder to 'self raisingise' it. Yeah, that's not really a word but I'm fairly sure it makes sense.

So the recipe:

Debs Sponge

8oz Doves Farm GF flour

8oz of softened butter or marg

8oz caster sugar

2oz dessicated coconut

4 eggs

1 tblsp milk

3 tsps GF baking powder (generous ones)

Cream the butter and sugar together.

Add the eggs in one at a time until well incorporated

Sift the flour and baking powder into the mix

Add in the coconut and enough milk to get a soft dropping consistency.

Then I sprayed the insides of the mould with lots of PAM (it's a buttery flavoured non sticking spray - alternatives would be to brush the interior with a flavourless oil or melted butter). It's worth taking some time doing this because of all the nooks and crannies.

I estimated the fill levels and also got four muffin sized buns out of this mix. In the end, it wasn't quite enough to fill the mould when it baked and I'd up it to a 5 egg ratio next time but I think it looks ok. It certainly tasted good and didn't last long when I took it into work.

I filled the cavity with a low sugar strawberry jam and a basic vanilla butter cream.

Please note the dip in the base is created with a sort of lid on the base of the mould rather than it sinking :) Honest.

So, this is what it looks like before it's iced. I'm not an experienced cake decorator but if you're so inclined, you can do all sorts of things with this including make it look like a cat, pig or dog.

This link has some good instructions and ideas. You can now buy the metal version of this mould in Lakeland, it's by a company called Wilton.